About Cal Skinner

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Angel Llavona is a tenured English as a Second Language (ESL) teacher in Maine Township High School District 207 which has schools in Park Ridge and Des Plaines in Cook County.

As of 2016 his pensionable income is $132,635 in his 22nd year teaching.

After 35 years of service he is eligible for a full pension which starts at 75% of the average of the last 4 years worked.

If he never receives another raise and achieves 35 years of service (which for most teachers and administrators in public schools in Illinois is less than 35 years worked), his starting pension will be $99,476 per year.

The pension will increase 3% annually for lifetime due to the 3% annual COLA, otherwise known as an automatic annuity increase.

Thus after 24 years in retirement, the pension will have doubled to $198,952.

In Illinois, pensions are not subject to state income tax.

Thus in retirement Mr. Llavona will make far more than the average person working.

Furthermore, he will not pay state income tax on that retirement income, whereas the wages of those employed are subject to state income tax.

The state income tax was increased this year, in large part to fund pensions, and past due bills.

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Is that system affordable to Illinois taxpayers?

Well, the state pensions are extremely expensive for taxpayers to finance due to the unfunded liability.

When an unfunded pension liability (taxpayer IOU to the pension fund) exists, there is also interest on the unfunded liability.

For Illinois state pensions, the interest is 7%, which is about the average of the expected rate of return for the 5 state pension funds.

The whole concept of interest derives from the fact that the rate of return on zero, is zero.

Thus since the unfunded liability represents the amount that is not in the pension fund, but should be, the interest is in lieu of investment returns.

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The annual interest on the unfunded liability of the 5 state pension funds for the years 2017 – 2045 is projected by a legislative commission in Illinois state government to be a grand total of $252,152.7 billion dollars.

That is $252,152,700,000.

That is interest only.

The interest for 2017 alone is projected at $9,186.2 billion dollars.

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Illinois has the most underfunded state pension funds among any state in the United States, or close to it.

This is a very serious problem, and the problem is worse in Illinois most, if not all of, the other states.

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The underfunded teacher and administrator pensions were enabled by:

– school districts are monopolies (taxpayers must fund the public schools).

There is no competition for that money.

Imagine the price at Wal-Mart, if your property taxes went to Wal-Mart, and not to Target or Sears.

You could shop at Target or Sears, but you would have to pay money out of your own pocket, in addition to the property tax dollars that already went to Wal-Mart.

– teacher unions are monopolies (if a teach union is present, only one is certified per school district).

– teacher unions have a monopoly on fees from teachers (even if a teacher elects not to join the union, in Illinois, the teacher must pay fees to the union).

There is an appeal to the US Supreme Court arguing such feels are illegal under freedom of speech.

– The teacher unions lobby at the Federal, state, and local level.

There is nowhere near an effective counter to that lobbying.

– The teacher unions provide election support to state and local politicians.

In return, politicians have hiked pension benefits, retiree healthcare benefits, current benefits, and salaries of teachers.

– In most communities, school districts are one of the largest, if not the largest employer.

They have a lot of political clout.

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There are many more reasons for this expensive educational system in Illinois, but that is a good start.

There is never enough money for public education.

In fact, this year, Senate Bill 1947 (SB 1947), signed into law as Public Act 100-0465, was passed to reform the method of distributing state revenue to local school districts.

The new law provide more state funding to local school districts, among other changes.

That is typical in Illinois; in the name of reform, taxpayers pay more.

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In a common maneuver in the way laws are created in Illinois, the bill as it was introduced to the legislature and thus taxpayer was completely changed.

This is known as wiping everything after the enacting clause.

The title of the bill remained the same though.

That is how that process works.

So if one scanned the list of bills in the 100th General Assembly, under SB 1947, one sees “SCH CD – Chronic Absent Pupils”.

That reflected the contents of the original bill, which was completely different than the bill as passed into state law.

That practice should be banned.

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Another problem, videotaped sessions are not available for free to taxpayers.

Taxpayers have to pay to watch Bluestream or pay for a CD of taped sessions.

That practice should be banned.

Illinois citizens should be able to view videotapes at their leisure for free to better understand the legislative process.

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The result of all this is we have a Democratic agitator teacher insulting a senior citizen blogger constantly because he does not believe in the bloggers political ideology.

The teacher is tenured, with a very high salary, and will receive a very high pension.

The process in which that salary and pension was achieved was one of political power wielded by public sector unions.

The taxpayers have many disadvantages, and are constantly misled by the unions.

There is nothing fair about the current system, and it is not affordable at current taxes, fees, and service levels.

It will result in lots of anger and chaos in the future.

$252 Billion just for interest for state pensions from 2017 – 2045 is incredible.

The power of organized labor in Illinois and the collusion of organized labor in Illinois is why we have a bigger problem than other states.

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So Teamsters Central States Pension Fund members who will see your pensions reduced, in no small part it appears due to past corruption in the union.

Have fun paying for Mr. Angel’s minimum $99,476 starting pension after 35 years service, and that’s if he never receives an other salary hike for the next 13 years.

That will increase to $198,952 after 24 years in retirement.

The benefit of which are contractual and cannot be diminished or impaired thanks to one sentence added to the Illinois State Constitution.

Pensions are not taxed in Illinois.

Ask a Teamster if they think Mr. Llavona’s pension is “fair.”

Teamsters are often truck drivers, but they have other bargaining units as well.

The Democrats are focused on their ground game, precincts, and defeating Randy Hultgren, Peter Roskam, and Bruce Rauner in 2018, using Donald Trump as the scapegoat to excite their base into a frenzy.

We’ll see if the Republicans can match or surpass that effort.

Have the Republicans had an event such as the one listed in the blog article in the past?

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In Illinois, the organizational structure of the Democrat party seems to be more focused on the counties, whereas the organizational structure of the Repubican party seems to be more focused on the US Congressional (US Representative) districts, but is shifting to include more heavily involve the counties?

In the flyer, the 14th Congressional district and 6th Congressional districts are listed, along with DeKalb County, DuPage County, Kane County, Lake County, McHenry County, and Will County.

Don’t forget that just prior to that LBJ introduced us to the welfare state with the sole stated purpose of making “the negro dependent on the government” for basic subsistence and broke down the foundation of american prosperity; the family.

“Projection: Projection is a psychological defense mechanism in which individuals attribute characteristics they find unacceptable in themselves to another person. For example, a husband who has a hostile nature might attribute this hostility to his wife and say she has an anger management problem”. “Projection is a form of defense in which unwanted feelings are displaced onto another person, where they then appear as a threat from the external world. A common form of projection occurs when an individual, threatened by his own angry feelings, accuses another of harbouring hostile thoughts.” Can you feel the hatred dripping from the fingertips of our sunshine prodigious researcher and his/her compulsive obsession about “agitators?” Sad day for you, miserable prodigious researcher in desperate need of praising and cheering, we know you too well. Your ridiculous cyber-bullying and gross intimidation tactics and lies will not work here. And now some more progressive prodigious research about the challenges the labor movement faces today. “On Labor Day, each year, there is the usual accurate observation that the decline in union strength is the principal reason workers’ wages have not kept pace with productivity over the past three decades; union representation in the private sector has fallen well below 7% compared to 35% in the 1950s. But, that decline in union power, and its result the undermining of the American Dream of a middle-class livelihood is rarely attributed to its real cause. That cause? The direct assault being waged by the union-busting industry, and the failure of the Labor Department and the National Labor Relations Board to stop repeat violations of the law. Many on the right too often attribute this decline wrongly to a lessening in the support for unions overall. The truth is that many people want to be in a union, and, by most public opinion measurements, that desire has not waned, and has even strengthened in recent years, according to some scholars. Richard Freeman, co-director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School, points out, “In 2002 the proportion of workers who said they would vote for a union rose above the proportion that said they would vote against a union for the first time in any national survey: a majority of nonunion workers now desire union representation in their workplace.” The narrative that support for unions is dying is just plain wrong. Instead, rarely making the headlines or exposed by the traditional media is a hidden, ugly war against unions, orchestrated by a sophisticated, multibillion-dollar industry. These union-busters are no longer the Pinkerton-style company goons who shot down strikers with impunity in the early 20th century. These days, they wear three-piece suits, work as lawyers or consultants for national law firms, and specialize in convincing you that no one wants to be in a union in the first place. Their stock-in-trade is spreading fear and intimidation. With the first murmurs of an attempt to unionize, they unload a barrage of videos, websites, posters, buttons, T-shirts and PowerPoint presentations for employers to deploy against their workers’ unionizing efforts. Some of them allegedly train supervisors how to intimidate workers. Some of them break the law if they need to, for example by illegally threatening to fire workers. Since penalties imposed by the National Labor Relations Board are small, large companies can view fines as just a cost of doing business. During the recent organizing effort at Nissan in Canton, Mississippi, for instance, supervisors inundated employees with anti-union messages in mandatory one-on-one meetings. Nissan broadcast anti-union videos inside the plant telling workers to “Vote No.” The union, as is the case in virtually every union election, had no such access to workers inside the plant. Indeed, six days before ballots were cast in the two-day election, the NLRB charged Nissan, not for the first time, for breaking the law by threatening workers with cuts in wages and benefits and holding out the possibility the plant would close if workers voted for the union. With this kind of fear coursing through the plant, workers voted 2-1 against the union. Even in situations where workers do vote in favor of a union, the battle does not end. It’s common for management to stall or use tactics of endless delay to avoid actually agreeing to terms with the new union. Delay is the friend of the union buster: after voting for a union, workers want to see immediate results from standing up against the company the entity that issues a paycheck. If companies and their union-busting lawyers can drag out the process, the company can, then, petition for a new vote one year later and worn-down workers are frequently too exhausted to put up with another battle. In this vicious war in the workplace, Donald Trump’s administration wants to make the union buster’s work even easier. During the Obama administration, then-Secretary of Labor Tom Perez (who is now the chair of the Democratic National Committee), led an effort to close a loophole in the so-called “Persuader Rule,” which mandates full disclosure of all activities undertaken by these union-busting consultants. Casting sunlight on the consultants operating behind the scenes is one tool unions can deploy: When workers learn who their company’s hiring to threaten and intimidate them, it can help build support for the union. But the current secretary of labor, Alexander Acosta, is moving to rescind the persuader rule and allow “indirect advice” to go unreported. That will allow much of the union buster’s activity to recede back into the shadows. If the activities of the union-busting industry received just 1% of the media coverage devoted to Russia’s involvement in the 2016 election, we might have a far different country where at least a modicum of democracy is present at work, where most of us spend half of our waking lives”. I am not an expert in this area, but you may as well think I am anyway. Please clap my prodigious research. Clap, clap, clap, clap, clap! Thank you. Tic, tock, tic, tock…

Perhaps my compassionate conservative brothers and sisters will some day be able to make up their minds about the Democratic Party. One day they say is the most horrific institution in the history of the planet, and the party of the KKK and real racism. The next day they say the Democratic party was once “honorable.” Our sunshine blog, the pride of McHenry county…tic, tock, tic, tock…

Thus, the state and local public sector worker laws vary in each state.

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Illinois state government has the highest percentage of union workers of all the states.

All of these Illinois union government employees contribute to state pension funds.

Public education teachers and administrators (most administrators are not in a union) outside of Chicago are in one of the 5 “state” pension funds in Illinois.

The name of that fund is TRS (Teachers Retirement System of Illinois).

The primary state government union is AFSCME.

The primary teacher unions are IEA – NEA and IFT – AFT.

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Illinois state government pensions are also the most underfunded pensions, or close to it (varies by year), of all the states.

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The Illinois state constitution has one sentence added on December 15, 1970 which states pensions are contractual and cannot be diminished or impaired.

A permitted result of that state constitution pension sentence, is pension benefits and salaries can be hiked by an unlimited amount, even if pensions are already underfunded, and regardless of the extent that pensions are underfunded.

The result has been in Illinois that repeated pension benefit and salary hikes occurred to underfunded pensions, and the result is massively underfunded state pensions.

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Primarily unions but other special interest groups as well, and primarily Democrats but Republicans as well, have created a system of government in Illinois that has indebted taxpayers for pension benefits.

That system financially harms those who do no benefit from the pensions.

Many such taxpayers harmed are themselves union members in local government or private industry.

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The problem is not unions are bad.

The problem is too much power is bad.

In Illinois state government, the state government unions, and in Illinois local government, the teacher unions, and the politicians at the state and local school board level, have too much power and that has resulted in massively underfunded state pensions.

Many union members are not state government employees or teachers.

There non teaching local government workers who contribute to IMRF, which has less lucrative benefits than the 5 state pension funds (but still very good benefits).

There are private sector union members, and they have less lucrative benefits than the 5 state pension funds.

Thus many union members are taxpayers who must fund pensions more generous than the ones they will receive.

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Once again, a key concept to understanding the state pension problem in Illinois is to understand the underfunded pensions have a principal and interest component.

The interest component is buried in the unfunded liability.

It is not reported as a separate line item.

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Why is it important to understand the unfunded liability (taxpayer IOU to the pension fund)?

Why is it important to understand there is interest accrued annually on that unfunded liability?

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That would be like asking, why is it important to understand the balance on a credit card that is being carried from one month to another.

And that would be like asking, why is it important to understand there is interest accrued monthly on any credit card balance carried over to another month.

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The interest makes it much more difficult to pay down that credit card balance.

And one gets no tangible benefit from the interest itself, just the principle.

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Just the interest on the unfunded liability of the 5 Illinois state pension funds for the years 2017 – 2045, at 7% interest, is a grand total $252,152.7 billion.

Taxpayers receive no tangible benefit from that over $252 billion in unfunded liability interest.

The interest represents the cost to finance the unfunded liability.

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Restated, credit card balances carried from one month to another, and unfunded pension liabilities, both result in interest.

The unfunded pension liability interest is a key takeaway that is not being reported by the press or the government.

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The unfunded liability interest is for pension benefits already accrued by state workers.

In other words, it is for work already performed.

The state constitution states that pension benefits are contractual and cannot be diminished or impaired.

This is a nightmare scenario.

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The five “state” pension funds are TRS, SURS, SERS, GARS, and JRS.

TRS = Teachers Retirement System of the State of Illinois

SURS = State University Retirement System

SERS = State Employees Retirement System

GARS = General Assembly Retirement System

JRS = Judges Retirement System

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Mr. Llavona is a Democrat agitator that contributes to the TRS pension fund as an English as a Second Language (ESL) teacher in a public school high district in Cook County, Illinois.

Mr. Llavona, unless he has opted out of the union, is a member of the Illinois Education Association (IEA) and National Education Association (NEA).

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There was no contention that all unions are bad.

Mr. Llavona, the Democrat agitator, happens to be a public school teacher in Illinois.

Thus, he is a member of, or pays fees to, a teacher union, in his case the IEA – NEA.

And he contributes to the teacher pension fund, in his case, TRS.

TRS is the most underfunded of all pension funds in Illinois.

TRS is one of the five “state” pension funds in Illinois.

The five “state” pension funds are massively underfunded.

The interest on the unfunded pension liability of those 5 state pension funds is massive.

Illinois has the most underfunded, or close to it (varies by year), pension funds of all states.

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It will take a lot of taxpayer labor to fund the 5 underfunded state pensions in Illinois, including the interest to finance the unfunded liability of those pensions (the interest is buried in the unfunded liability).

Precinct Committeemen should at least understand the basics of the problem.

In the name of transparency, accountability and the sunshine holy spirit, Amen. Let us pray and celebrate! Happy Labor Day 2017 to our paparazzi freeloader sunshine blogger, our sunshine commenters and the entire readership of this compassionate conservative sunshine blog, the pride of McHenry county (estimated to be approximately 14 people)! Now, a few acronyms to impress others as to how much I know about the world.

IEE = Independent Educational Evaluation

HI = Hearing Impaired

K-12 = Kindergarten through 12th Grade

OCD = Obsessive Compulsive Disorder

GE = General Education

GPA = Grade Point Average

NCLB – No Child Left Behind of 2001

PAC – Parent Advisory Committee

SD = School District

OCR – Office for Civil Rights

HS = High School

ES = Elementary School

S = School

MCSB = McHenry County Sunshine Blog

OMGSIATC = Oh, my God! Socialism is around the corner!

Next, some more prodigious research to learn about the challenges the labor movement face today and be praised by all sunshine commenters. “Working people are taking fewer vacation days and working more. That’s the top finding in a new national survey, conducted by polling firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research for the AFL-CIO in collaboration with the Economic Policy Institute and the Labor Project for Working Families. In the survey, the majority of America’s working people credit labor unions for many of the benefits they receive.

In response to the poll, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said:

Union workers empowered by the freedom to negotiate with employers do better on every single economic benchmark. Union workers earn substantially more money, union contracts help achieve equal pay and protection from discrimination, union workplaces are safer, and union workers have better access to health care and a pension.

Here are the other key findings of the survey:

1. Union membership is a key factor in whether a worker has paid time off. While 78% of working people have Labor Day off, that number is 85% for union members. If you have to work on Labor Day, 66% of union members get overtime pay (compared to 38% of nonunion workers). And 75% of union members have access to paid sick leave (compared to only 64% of nonunion workers). Joining together in union helps working people care and provide for their families.

2. Working people go to work and make the rest of their lives possible. We work to spend time with our families, pursue our dreams and come together to build strong communities. For too many Americans, that investment doesn’t pay off. More than half of Americans work more holidays and weekends than ever before. More than 40% bring home work at least one night a week. Women, younger workers and shift workers report even less access to time off.

3. Labor Day is a time for crucial unpaid work caring for our families. Our families rely on that work, and those who don’t have the day off and have less time off from work can’t fulfill those responsibilities. A quarter of workers with Labor Day off report they will spend the holiday caring for children, running errands or doing household chores.

4. Women are less likely than men to get paid time off or to get paid overtime for working on Labor Day. Women are often the primary caregivers in their households, making this lack of access to time off or overtime more damaging to families. Younger women and those without a college education are even less likely to get time off or overtime for working on Labor Day.

5. Most private-sector workers do not have access to paid family leave through their employer. Only 14% of private-sector workers have paid family leave through their job. The rest have less time to take care of a family member’s long-term illness, recover from a medical condition or care for a new child. As a result, nearly a quarter of employed women who have a baby return to work within two weeks.

6. Over the past 10 years, 40 million working people have won the freedom to take time off from work. Labor unions have been at the center of these wins.

Recently, the AFL-CIO played a lead role in fights to expand access to paid sick leave and paid family and medical leave in in New Jersey, New York and Washington, D.C. Individual unions have been at the forefront of new and ongoing fights in Arizona, Maryland, Massachusetts, Oregon and Washington.

7. An overwhelming majority of Americans think unions help people enter the middle class and are responsible for working people getting Labor Day and other paid holidays off from work. More than 70% of Americans agree. A plurality of Americans think weaker unions would have a negative impact on whether or not they have adequate paid time off from work. The majority of Americans would vote to join a union if given the opportunity. A recent Gallup poll showed that 61% of Americans approve of unions, the highest percentage since 2003.
Please parise this research. Clap, clap, clap, clap, clap! Thank you, but may the glory be given to the Lord, not to me. Tic, tock, tic, tock…

The problem in Illinois with public sector unions is they have too much power and they collude with politicians to extract unreasonable sums of money from taxpayers, and that includes Mr. Llavona’s salary and pension, as indicated above.

The problem is not unions exist.

Mr. Llavona in 2016 had pensionable income of $132,635 as a high school English as a Second Language (ESL) teacher in his 22nd year teaching.

His starting pension will be $99,476 per year IF he never receives another pay raise until he retires.

The pension will increase 3% annually, so after 24 years in retirement, his pension will be $198,952 IF he does not receive another pay raise until he retires.

That is assuming 35 years of service, and in most cases, for teachers and administrators in the TRS pension system, that is less than 35 years worked.

A full pension for Tier I TRS is 75% of the average of the last 4 years worked.

In Illinois, pensions are not subject to state income tax.

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Is that system affordable?

Well, teacher and administrator pension system for teachers and administrators in public schools outside of Chicago is TRS.

– Instead of $208 billion in the 5 funds, there was $81.5 billion in the 5 state pension funds.

The payment scheme for taxpayers to fund that liability from calls for $252 billion interest on the unfunded pension liability from 2017 – 2045, and that only brings the pensions to 90% funded, not 100% funded.

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That is the power of organized labor, other special interest groups, and politicians in Illinois to indebt taxpayers to fund lucrative pensions.

“The union membership rate–the percent of wage and salary workers who were members of
unions–was 10.7 percent in 2016, down 0.4 percentage point from 2015, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today.

“The number of wage and salary workers belonging to unions, at 14.6 million in 2016, declined by 240,000 from 2015. In 1983, the first year for which comparable union data are available, the union membership rate was 20.1 percent, and there were 17.7 million union workers.”

Summarizing – Over the last 33 years, union membership is down from 20.1 percent participation in
1983 to 10.7 percent at the end of 2016.

“Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is an anxiety disorder in which time people have recurring, unwanted thoughts, ideas or sensations (obsessions) that make them feel driven to do something repetitively (compulsions). The repetitive behaviors, such as hand washing, checking on things or cleaning, can significantly interfere with a person’s daily activities and social interactions.

Many people have focused thoughts or repeated behaviors. But these do not disrupt daily life and may add structure or make tasks easier. For people with OCD, thoughts are persistent and unwanted routines and behaviors are rigid and not doing them causes great distress. Many people with OCD know or suspect their obsessions are not true; others may think they could be true (known as poor insight). Even if they know their obsessions are not true, people with OCD have a hard time keeping their focus off the obsessions or stopping the compulsive actions.

A diagnosis of OCD requires the presence of obsession and/or compulsions that are time-consuming (more than one hour a day), cause major distress, and impair work, social or other important function. About 1.2 percent of Americans have OCD and among adults slightly more women than men are affected. OCD often begins in childhood, adolescence or early adulthood; the average age symptoms appear is 19 years old”.

Next, a few achievements of the labor movement that workers today take for granted and the corporate masters would love to see go away:

The weekend

Overtime pay

Paid vacation

Child labor laws

Retirement security

Unemployment compensation

Health benefits

Safety standards

8-hour workday

Minimum wage

Sick days

I learned from compassionate conservative, family values Joe Walsh to take care of my family, take responsibility for my actions and to be appreciative of all workers. See a worker? Thank a worker! Tic, tock, tic, tock…